The vitriol aimed at Jack Monroe says much more about her attackers

The Tories and their supporters in the press expect people in poverty to accept their fate – and never talk back

'Jack Monroe (pictured) and Cait Reilly are threatening because they do not accept what is given by a government that frames all poverty as barbarity, self-induced and deserving of punishment.' Photograph: Graeme Robertson Graeme Robertson/Graeme Robertson

In the week that the House of Commons debated the morality of food banks, and Iain Duncan Smith slunk out, what is the polite kind of poverty? I ask because two formerly unemployed women – the Guardian's food writer Jack Monroe, and Cait Reilly, the woman who challenged the Department of Work and Pensions's attempts to make her work at Poundland in exchange for benefits – have been subject to vicious attacks in 2013. The fury they have incited is irrational; it shows us something interesting about Cameron's willing propagandists.

Monroe left her job when she had a child and was denied flexible working hours. This is a dilemma that mainly women face, and it is usually framed in absolutes: do you choose to be an absent mother, or a drain on the state? (Both answers are, of course, wrong. The only right answer, if this is the question, is a conservative one: be a present mother, and a drain on the father.)

Monroe found she could not feed her child easily on a low income, so she cooked; she cooked and she blogged. Now she will front a campaign for Sainsbury's – a decision which she has, disgracefully, been made to defend. Is Monroe in well-paid work, Monroe Triumphans, a kind of betrayal, even to her supporters? Does success spoil her unique brand, which is plucky victimhood, and now her trajectory disappoints? (In fact she will not be rich on Sainsbury's gold, because she is giving most of it away. Some people do, although her critics will be baffled. Generosity of spirit arouses mistrust in those who have none.)

Even before this news, the sky fell in on her kitchen. Rightwing columnists denounced her in such facile terms that their only true objection could be her presumption (and her status as a single mother, obviously); shouldn't the poor live on chips and air? Liz Jones told her off in the Mail on Sunday for implacable cruelty to pigs because one recipe contained bacon; what about the pigs, she asked. Quite. Brendan O'Neill of the Daily Telegraph ascribed the worst possible motives to Monroe's campaign to feed her only child: why would she possibly want to write about nutrition, he wrote, except to patronise those on low wages, as if Monroe picked up a pencil with nothing but that in mind.

Richard Littlejohn, who is possibly the highest paid journalist in Britain – a sentence which I can never type without weeping, or laughing, depending on where the light falls on the sundial – wrote a piece of quite unspeakable malice in the Daily Mail. He pondered, with a good deal of incomprehension, Monroe's use of kale in a recipe. Kale? What is that? "It is beyond parody," he wrote, with his customary journalistic sloth; save us from journalists with catch-phrases. It certainly is beyond parody, from a man who has never had to feed a child on pennies. When I think of it, was Richard Littlejohn fed as a child? I suppose he must have been, but I think I sense a hunger there.

Cait Reilly was no less unfortunate. She was working unpaid in an art gallery, hoping to secure paid work, when, in order to continue claiming jobseeker's allowance, she was forced to work unpaid at Poundland. Using the unemployed to provide cheap labour is obscene: should the government subsidise Poundland and decimate paid jobs? Reilly fought it in the courts. Ah, presumption! Where was her humility, her acquiescence to her fate?

What do they want, these propagandists? A placid kind of poverty, maybe, the kind that can be governed, ignored, and lied to; the kind that never talks back but accepts that elites take everything and, to the rest, nothing. Monroe and Reilly are threatening because they do not accept what is given by a government that frames all poverty as barbarity, self-induced and deserving of punishment. Mick Philpott, the man who burnt his children to death "for a new and bigger council house", was the poster-psychopath for this narrative; Monroe and Reilly are his nemeses. They must be slandered into silence, principally with the slur that in seeking something better, they are traitors to the rest. Self-interested. Self-obsessed. Kale.

This narrative is essential for an administration that has pulled all ladders up behind it. Fairness was its terrible lie in 2010; and those who point out this lie expose the unmentionable, and impolite, truth. This government has failed to act in the interests of the majority; that is, it has failed.